


and my rusty ammunition has been left out in the rain

by halfmoonsevenstars



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Russian Doll AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-02-04
Packaged: 2019-10-22 08:11:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17659202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfmoonsevenstars/pseuds/halfmoonsevenstars
Summary: Bucky doesn't know that this will his first death until he dies again, and again, and again.An AU inspired by the Netflix series 'Russian Doll,' starring Natasha Lyonne.





	and my rusty ammunition has been left out in the rain

Bucky doesn't know that this will be his first death until he dies again, and again, and again.

They're standing on a stunningly cold mountain, waiting for the train to come their way, and he doesn't look down because it might make him sick if he does, and wouldn't _that_ go over well with the Howlies, watching their expert sniper lose his breakfast because he's afraid of a little zip line.

So he cracks a joke instead. "Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone at Coney Island?"

Steve, the only one who knows Bucky well enough to hear the slight tremor in his voice, shoots him a sideways look. "Yeah, and I threw up?"

"This isn't payback, is it?"

"Now why would I do that?"

It's over in a matter of minutes.

One moment Bucky's on the train taking down Nazi creeps and enjoying every moment of it - he probably shouldn't take such pleasure in killing, but it's his firm belief that turnabout is fair play and you don't get to murder millions of people in the name of eugenics and escape the consequences - and the next he's hanging off the train with Steve's anguished face looming above him, begging him to hang on.

He screams until he's out of breath, his body silently breaking on jagged rocks clustered at the bottom of the ravine like some ancient saint consigned to crumbling vellum.

Bucky hadn't known there could be so much pain.

\- -

He blinks in the morning sunlight, half-blinded by the snow. Hadn't he just - is this the afterlife? Or did he hallucinate it? It must be the stress. Bucky decides, and he runs his hand through his hair until it sticks up like a hedgehog's.

"Buck, you okay?" Steve looks worried. Bucky's always been vain about his hair, even when they're about to carry out a raid.

"Yeah, I just - I had the weirdest..." _Vision_ sounds too much like something his great-aunt the Carmelite nun would say, but luckily he doesn't have to finish because the train comes into view just then.

Bucky falls and lands on soft powdery snow that plumes into the air and then falls back onto his face. He wants to get up, but he can't seem to find his arm.

He shouldn't feel so warm. It's so cold that this morning they'd all had to heat up the water bucket to shave instead of just breaking through the layer of ice on top - the water had frozen nearly solid. Why doesn't he feel cold? Is this what it's like to freeze to death? There was a Jack London story Bucky had read once about a man who couldn't build a fire. He would build one if he could, but he can't seem to move. It's like he and the ground have become one. Even the blood has stopped flowing from where his left arm used to be, crusted into a glossy carapace.

Bucky sleeps.

\- -

The mountain again.

"Steve," Bucky whispers to him when the others are huddled together, going over the plan one last time. "I think I'm dead."

"We're all dead if we fuck this up," Steve says affably, as if it's no big deal.

"No, I mean I'm _already_ dead."

Steve frowns now. "Are you okay?"

"No, I'm not okay, Steve, I've already impaled myself on a bunch of rocks and frozen to death. What's it gonna be this time? What am I being punished for?"

He hadn't realized his voice had gotten so loud until the other Howlies stop talking and stare at Bucky like he's lost his marbles.

Bucky sighs. "Fuck it. Let's just get this over with."

A few Soviets find him a little while after he hits the ground, his left arm taking most of the impact and dispersing it by way of removing itself entirely from his body.

He can't form words to ask them to put him out of his misery, but they see the look in Bucky's eyes and grant his plea for mercy anyway.

He doesn't feel a thing after hearing the Mosin-Nagant's hammer click as it's cocked back.

\- -

No matter what Bucky does, he can't make it stop. He just keeps dying over and over again.

\- -

He disintegrates when the HYDRA lackey with the blaster hits him full force instead of the side of the train.

\- -

The next time, he manages to duck, but then another one shoots him in the neck and he chokes on his own blood.

\- -

Someone manages to get to the engine and brings the train to a screeching halt just as it's entering a sharp curve. It derails and tumbles off the side of the mountain like a badly-used Lionel set at Christmas.

They all die.

\- -

A wolf tears out his throat while he lies immobilized in a thicket of brambles, without the strength to free his uniform from the thorns.

\- -

He falls, over and over. He lands on the rocks again, on the riverbank, on a sharp ledge, into the river itself.

The best thing Bucky can say about these deaths is that at least they don't take very long.

\- -

The worst death is the one where he takes Steve down with him, but at least they hold hands the entire time. Only hitting the cement-like frozen river forces them apart. Steve shatters on the ice like a crystal glass, and Bucky is vaguely aware that he’s glad Steve went first before the blackness overtakes him, replaced instantaneously with blinding snow-light.

\- -

Soviets, again. This time, they don't shoot him to put him out of his misery but make a sort of stretcher from a few blankets and long straight branches.

One of the officers leans down and tells Bucky something that he can’t understand, but a predatory smile twists his mouth.

(Later, when he has had Russian programmed into him, he knows that the man had told him, “You’re ours now, soldier.” They burn the memory out of his brain when he mentions it.)

When Bucky wakes up again, it’s not on the mountain.

He’s in a laboratory with no windows, no clocks, nothing but men in white coats and trays lined with instruments that look like they have teeth. He can’t feel his left arm anymore and doesn’t care, because his right arm is just as good at killing people.

Once they manage to subdue him, which takes a long time, they put him back to sleep and he braces himself for the dazzling whiteness of snow.

It doesn’t come.

\- -

He wakes up to searing white-hot pain, which is how Bucky knows he isn’t dead this time, but he wishes he were. It’s hard to make his eyes focus; when they do, he sees an odious little man with little round glasses and a little toadlike smile on his fatuous little face, and Bucky prepares to draw back his fist and punch those glasses through his skull.

“The procedure has already begun,” Toad says, and Bucky’s eyes follow his until he sees what the man means.

He has a left arm again. It shines as brightly as the pain.

“You are to be the new fist of HYDRA.”

Maybe he is dead after all, because this certainly feels like the deepest, coldest circle of hell to him.

\- -

Every time they put him back to sleep after a mission - jabbing him with needles that are supposed to make him lose consciousness before the cold overtakes him, but they never do, and it's not peaceful in the least, and it _hurts_ , fuck, it hurts - it's like dying all over again. Except when he wakes up, there's nobody he loves standing there, waiting for him and smiling like this is all one big Coney Island funhouse adventure.

Until the last time.

There is no snow, no train, no guerrilla band behind them, no Nazis to intercept, no ravine, no breath forming into little clouds. The sun is out, but it has the softness and promise of spring rather than the harshness of light reflected on glittering white powder.

They’re on another bridge, and he knows this man. He knows this man no matter what they try to tell him, no matter how long they try to erase it from his memory, no matter how many times they hit him.

Bucky wakes up, and he stays that way.

**Author's Note:**

> In keeping with my inspiration from 'Russian Doll,' I used a line from Harry Nilsson's “Old Forgotten Soldier” for the title.


End file.
